Replaceable Parents: Neil Gaiman's the Day I Swapped My Dad for Two
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Growing Up with (Ir)Replaceable Parents: Neil Gaiman’s The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book Marek Oziewicz studies Key words: Neil Gaiman, parent-child relationship, child development, identity formation, vicarious literary experience, desire, The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish, Coraline, The Graveyard Book. Klíčová slova: Neil Gaiman, vztah mezi rodiči a dětmi, vývoj dítěte, formování identity, zprostředkovaný literární prožitek, touha, Den, kdy jsem vyměnil tátu za dvě zlaté rybky, Koralína, Kniha hřbitova. Abstract: One of the most popular fantasy authors today, Neil Gaiman has been notorious for representing children’s ambivalent perceptions of parents and creating stories based on a child’s fantasies of replacing parents with better or kinder ones. This essay offers a reading ofThe Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish (1998/2004), Coraline (2002), and The Graveyard Book (2008) as narratives in which this desire is sublimated, allowing the young reader to vicariously experience the empow- erment and the danger that accrue from replacing, getting rid of, or exchanging one’s parents. I demonstrate that in each of the three books Gaiman confirms the child’s perception of parents as potentially replaceable, but suggests that this awareness serves a vital developmental purpose. First, it helps the child protagonist outgrow dependence on the parents and, often in rebellion to them, begin to move toward emotional and psychological independence. Second, it leaves the pro- tagonists with a more mature understanding of the parent-child relationship – a realization that the agency they seek is spurious when achieved by finding parents who would cater to all of one’s desires. In struggling to come to terms with their parents’ limited availability and imperfections, Gaiman’s protagonists learn that lasting human relationships are built not in the absence of but despite our own and other people’s shortcomings. bohemica litteraria >> 83 > 18 / 2015 / 2 Marek Oziewicz Growing Up with (Ir)Replaceable Parents: Neil Gaiman’s The Day I Swapped My Dad … Abstrakt: Dospívání s (ne)nahraditelnými rodiči: Den, kdy jsem vyměnil tátu za dvě zla- té rybky, Koralína a Kniha hřbitova Neila Gaimana Neil Gaiman, jeden z nejpopulárnějších fantasy autorů současnosti, proslul zobrazováním rozpor- ného vnímání rodičů dětmi a vytvářením příběhů založených na představě dítěte o výměně vlast- ních rodičů za nějaké lepší nebo laskavější. Tato studie nabízí čtení textů Den, kdy jsem vyměnil tátu za dvě zlaté rybky (1998/2004), Koralína (2002, první vydání česky 2003) a Kniha hřbitova (2008, česky 2008) jako vyprávění, v nichž je tato touha vyplněna, takže mladý čtenář zprostředkovaně zažívá pocity moci a zároveň nebezpečí, které vzešly z nahrazení, zbavení se nebo výměny rodičů. Ukazuji, že v každé ze tří knih Gaiman potvrzuje dětské vnímání rodičů jako potenciálně nahra- studies ditelných, ale naznačuje, že toto povědomí hraje důležitou roli ve vývoji dítěte. Za prvé, pomáhá dětským protagonistům přerůst závislost na svých rodičích a, často prostřednictvím vzpoury proti nim, je vede směrem k emoční a psychické nezávislosti. Za druhé, opouští protagonisty s vyspělej- ším pochopením vztahu rodičů a dětí a s poznáním, že cíl, jehož se snaží dosáhnout, se ukazuje jako falešný v okamžiku, kdy uspějí a naleznou rodiče, kteří jim splní všechna přání. Ve snaze vyrovnat se s omezenými možnostmi a nedostatky svých rodičů Gaimanovi hrdinové poznávají, že trvalé lidské vztahy fungují navzdory našim i cizím nedostatkům, nikoli díky jejich absenci. “You are almost never cool to your children” (GAIMAN 2010: 315). In the “Afterword” of the 2004 edition, Neil Gaiman recalled an episode that led to the creation of The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish. After he’d said “one of those things that parents say, like ‘isn’t it time you were in bed?’” his son Mikey looked at him crossly and declared he wished he didn’t have a dad. “‘I wish I had …’ and then he stopped and thought, trying to think what one could have instead of a father. Finally he said, ‘I wish I had goldfish!’” (GAIMAN 2004: 54). The idea of replacing a parent may not be peculiar to Mikey Gaiman alone. A child’s anger at having been denied something or at having to comply with an adult’s commands is familiar to any parent. It is also a ubiquitous fea- ture of any child’s experience. Despite the importance of parent–child attach- ment in early and middle childhood – or perhaps because of it – the fantasy of replacing one’s parents with kinder, better, more accomplished or “true” ones is a common desire in childhood. It is so common, in fact, that it was recognized by Freud as a type of belief he called “family romance” and was identified by Brian Attebery to be fundamental to “the Romance of Hidden Identity” pattern that informs much of children’s literature (ATTEBERY 2014: 100). Of course, daydreaming about replacing one’s parents is likely to be felt as shameful and is > 84 >> bohemica litteraria 18 / 2015 / 2 Marek Oziewicz Growing Up with (Ir)Replaceable Parents: Neil Gaiman’s The Day I Swapped My Dad … almost never discussed openly. In psychoanalytical terms, a child’s resentment toward parents, as well as its attendant self–guilt, becomes suppressed. One way to release this tension is to sublimate it through stories through which the young reader can vicariously experience the empowerment and the danger that accrue from replacing, getting rid of, or exchanging one’s parents. My focus in this essay is on three works by Neil Gaiman that engage this desire: The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish (1998/2004), Coraline (2002), and The Graveyard Book (2008). Each of these books can be approached from many angles and lends itself to a reading as a postmodern subversion that plays with the reader’s normative expectations about genres and literary representations of authority or interpersonal relations. However, some of the most thought– studies provoking interpretations of Gaiman’s work have focused on their psychologi- cal dimension. David Rudd, for example, notes Gaiman’s notoriety for exploring “areas seen by many as inappropriate for children” (RUDD 2008: 159), and in- terprets Coraline as “a quite overt fictional representation of the Freudian un- canny” (RUDD 2008: 161). Gaiman’s works have been discussed as instances of children’s Gothic, whose motifs “operate rather obviously as metaphors for unconscious depths” (COATS 2008: 77–8); they have been applauded for be- ing “riddled with disturbing psychological dilemmas” related to the formation of a child’s identity (PARSONS, SAWERS, AND MCINALLY 2008: 371). These and other critics – including Richard Gooding, Mike Ashley, and others – have affirmed that Gaiman’s works offer clues to the psychological costs of a young person’s negotiation of identity with their parents. For all of their unsettling elements, Gaiman’s tales “may provide the kind of preparation for adult life that Bruno Bettelheim once imagined for the fairy tale genre” (GOODING 2008: 405): namely, that growing up is rife with threats, but they must be faced and can be overcome. This, too, is my argument in this essay. Specifically, I demonstrate that by creating fantastic thought–experiments about achieving greater independence through replacing one’s parents, Gaiman confirms the child’s perception of par- ents as potentially replaceable, but suggests that this awareness serves a vital developmental purpose. First, it helps the child protagonist outgrow her or his dependence on the parents and, often in rebellion to them, begin to move to- ward emotional and psychological independence. Second, it leaves the protago- nists with a more mature understanding of the parent–child relationship – a re- alization that the agency they seek is spurious when achieved by finding parents who would cater to all of one’s desires. In struggling to come to terms with their bohemica litteraria >> 85 > 18 / 2015 / 2 Marek Oziewicz Growing Up with (Ir)Replaceable Parents: Neil Gaiman’s The Day I Swapped My Dad … parents’ limited availability and imperfections, Gaiman’s protagonists learn that lasting human relationships are built not in the absence of, but despite our own and other people’s shortcomings. It is stating the obvious that parents are a problem, especially in children’s literature. Traditional fairy tales – while “never really meant for children’s ears alone” (TATAR 2005: xiv) – teem with parents who abandon children in the wil- derness, kill or eat them, exchange them for desirable objects, or tolerate their abuse by stepmothers and strangers. The graphic descriptions of murder, mu- tilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest to be found in the Grimms’ tales have been famously dubbed by Tatar as “the hard facts” of the fairy tale genre studies (TATAR 2005: 190). The presence of these facts is explained by the recognition that the folk and fairy tales are in large part “historical documents” (DARNTON 1984: 13) that have been ontologically concerned “with exploitation, hunger, and injustice familiar to the lower classes in pre–capitalist [and early–capital- ist] societies” (ZIPES 1979: 6). When children’s literature came of age in the 19th century, its debt to the fairy tale subsequently included a strong tendency to focus on orphan characters. The elimination of parents was assumed to cre- ate a better space for a child character’s growth and accounts for the ubiquity of orphan protagonists in fiction for the young. According to Jerry Griswold, over the course of the 19th century orphanhood was elevated to a quintessential narrative pattern in children’s literature that precedes the hero’s triumph in the coming of age story. In this plot pattern the child’s parents die, or the child is separated from its parents and effectively orphaned.